Glossary of Affiliate Marketing Terms
Advertiser: The person selling the goods or service; also knows as the merchant. The advertiser or merchant pays affiliates for sending traffic to the merchant’s web site after a product or service is purchased.
Affiliate Link: A URL tracking link that identifies the affiliate and sends traffic to the merchant’s web site. For example, a link might look like http://yourdomainname/offers.AffiliateID_abcdefg=00-4201=sub_id_24609
Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.
Analytics: the science of logical analysis. [statistical data and collected informative data].
Backlinks: A backlink is an incoming link from an another website. Google uses backlinks in their page ranking formulation because quality backlinks are essentially like citations and can increase your website’s SEO.
Banner Ad: An electronic advertisement or billboard such as an animated GIF, Flash Movie, JPEG that advertisers a product, service, or web site.
Click-through: The action when a user clicks on a link and follows through to the merchant’s web site.
Click-Through Ratio (CTR): percentage of visitors who click-through on a link to visit the merchant’s web site.
CMS - content management system, or CMS, is a web-based software platform that allows site owners to create, update, and remove HTML content on their website on a day-to-day basis.
Commission: Income an affiliate earns for generating a sale, lead or click-through to a merchant’s web site. Sometimes called a referral fee, a finder’s fee or a bounty.
Conversion Rate: Percentage of clicks that result in a commissionable activity (sale or lead).
CPA (Cost Per Action): The amount of cost for a conversion such as a sale or lead.
CPC (Cost Per Click):Â Cost of an individual click when paying on a per click basis.
CPM (Cost Per Thousand): The cost of 1000 banner impressions.
CPO (Cost Per Order):Â Same as CPA but refers specifically to sales.
E-mail Link: An affiliate link to a merchant site in an e-mail newsletter, signature, or a dedicated e-mail blast.
EPC (Earnings Per click): Average earnings per 100 clicks. A relative rating that describes the ability to turn clicks into commissions.
Feed (or news feed) is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it.
Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.
Google Buzz. This is one of the newest additions to the Google family. To access this product, you’ll need a Gmail account. Buzz is aiming to compete with the Twitter and Facebook communities, among other social networks. In other words, it’s trying to improve online conversations. Last year Google launched Wave, which was trying to capture the social audience. While Wave did have some cool features, Buzz definitely looks more promising since it’s integrated within your Gmail account. What also makes it interesting in a business environment is the ability to have private or public real-time conversations, helping to increase your organization’s productivity with easier collaboration using comment threads with status updates.
Google Chrome: This Google download is like the ugly stepsister in the browser world: it just doesn’t get the attention it deserves. While Mozilla’s Firefox is an excellent web browser, what makes Chrome even better is one simple thing: this Google product allows you to search directly from the address bar. PLUS, who need 100 buttons taking up space on your viewing area of your screen.  CHROME is just what you need for maximum viewing space and most important features.
HTML code: Refers to the lines of code that an affiliate places on their web page(s) for linking to the merchant’s site. This HTML code contains the unique identifier that identifies the traffic as coming from the Affiliate’s web site.
Impression: How many times a banner advertisement was displayed or viewed.
niche – a place or position suitable or appropriate for a person or thing: to find one’s niche in the business world.
Pay-Per-Sale: An affiliate marketing program that rewards affiliates based on each conversion to a sale such as when purchasing a product or service from the merchant’s web site. Pay-per-sale programs usually offer the highest commissions but tend to have the lowest conversion rates.
Pay-Per-Lead: Affiliate program that rewards affiliates for conversions to leads. A lead might include a signup form, software download, survey, contest or sweepstakes entry, signup for a trial, etc. Pay-per-lead generally offers midrange commissions and midrange to high conversion ratios.
Pay-Per-Click: Rewards an affiliate for each unique click to the merchant’s web site. This type of affiliate program is uncommon because of click fraud or fake clicks.
RSS (most commonly expanded as “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.[2] An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”,[3] or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.
SEM is just a part of Internet marketing which works by improving the search engine visibility of webpage in search engine results. SEM methods include Search engine optimisation, PPC, and Paid inclusion.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to aweb site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.
Search Engine Visibility improving the search engine visibility of webpage in search engine results is a way to increase visitors which ultimately convert into earnings by PPC, Conversions, or by simply buying your product for that particular niche.
Targeted Marketing: Offering the right offer to the right customer at the right time.
Tracking Method: the way that a program tracks referred sales, leads or clicks. The most common are by using a unique web address (URL) for each affiliate, or by embedding an affiliate ID number into the link that is processed by the merchant’s software. Some programs also use cookies for tracking.
Text Link: link that is not accompanied by a graphical image.
Tracking Code: Refers to the hidden 1X1 pixel tracking code that is placed on the confirmation page of your store for tracking sales conversions.
Unique Click: The process of only counting unique clicks from each web visitor. Unique clicks are typically tracked by recording the IP address and browser header.
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